The Sims Game Project Rene Announced, First Look Revealed
The Sims creators Electronic Arts and Maxis announced a new project called "Project Rene" to close out the first ever Behind the Sims Summit, a project which has been described as the next generation of The Sims. This reveal was accompanied by what the creators indicated was a very, very early look at gameplay, though the scenes shown should be familiar enough to anyone who's already been active in The Sims' community for years now, but it still teased some changes discussed in part during the stream.
You can catch the first look at Project Rene at the very end of the video below that showed a user customizing some living spaces. In Project Rene, it appears as though the grid-based design used in The Sims games will no longer be present since we see the user moving their objects freely about to be as precise as they'd like. It was also confirmed in the stream that players would be able to customize things like sizes, shapes, and patterns of different objects as well as colors, too.
Another neat detail about Project Rene shown during the stream was the fact that multiple users can interact in the same space together while they're playing. We see that through different cursors moving about the interface while gameplay was shown to indicate that more than one person was selecting things at once. People can play solo, of course, but if you choose to do so, you can publish and share your creations with others for them to see and presumably interact with, too.
This game will also be playable on multiple platforms seemingly at the exact same time. One part of the stream showed the game running on a PC while an identical version of it was displayed on a phone. As changes were made on the former, the latter changed, too.
The bad news is that this Sims project is years away now. That was reiterated more than once during the stream with updates said to be shared on this project over the next couple of years, so don't expect to be playing Project Rene anytime soon.